Sue Slick, Collection Information Specialist
While we’re still marveling over the history and heroics of The Ghost Army, marking the season of gratitude and the honoring of our Veterans, we also remember and honor the artists in our collection whose art served the U.S. military in wartime. Some applied their art training directly to their service, while others sketched their wartime experiences in their spare time while serving.
A few of our collection artists served as camoufleurs in Europe during World War I. This is defined as, “a person who designed and implemented military camouflage in one of the world wars of the twentieth century.”
Read part 1 of this article here.
William Saltzman [American, 1916-2006]
Minneapolis native, William Saltzman studied at the University of Minnesota and the Art Students League, New York. Over his lifetime, he worked as painter, sculptor, muralist, designer and educator, working in media such as copper relief and stained glass. His work adorns many public spaces and places of worship mainly in the American Midwest, being exhibited in such locations as the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Corcoran Gallery of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago. During World War II, Saltzman was a member of the U.S. Army Camouflage unit in the European theatre serving as a camouflage advisor. A professor at St. Paul, Minnesota’s Macalester College for 17 years, he retired from active teaching in 1983 as Professor Emeritus.
Max Altekruse [American, 1920-2015]
Max Altekruse was a Fort Wayne native and a student of the Fort Wayne Art School. He was awarded an art scholarship after graduating from Northside High School. While a student at the Art School, studying under Homer Davisson and Forrest Stark, Max honed his already impressive drawing skills. Upon enlisting in the Army in 1942, Altekruse shipped out to the South Pacific for three years of combat service, witnessing traumatizing action as a medic and losing many friends to enemy fire. During intermittent calm spells he made sketches of Army life during wartime. Some of these non-combat scenes were sent home and published in Fort Wayne newspapers.
When Altekruse returned to Fort Wayne, he carried so much of the trauma of battle home that his wife urged him to destroy the artwork he had brought home hoping that would help him let go of the memories of combat and loss. Altekruse, a quiet, modest man, seldom spoke of his World War II experiences. After the war, he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and later studied at the Art Students League in New York under Frank Reilly. He went on to a very successful career as a corporate illustrator, educator and painter, winning many awards and accolades.
Garo Z. Antreasian [American, 1922-2018]
Born in Indianapolis, Indiana, Garo Antreasian enlisted in the U.S. Coast Guard in 1943. He served as a combat artist on the landing ships that conducted the invasions of Iwo Jima and Okinawa. He described his combat artist role as, “A matter of going where the ship took me, and if we made landings, I’d go ashore and make drawings, and usually in the heat of action, you can’t just sit still and make a painting. I ended up simply writing diaries of impressions. Then when we pulled off of the beach and would, sort of, regroup, then I would begin to develop the paintings and more involved works of art while we would be underway going someplace else. Some of the other artists used to have cameras. I never had a camera with me that could quickly snap action and use that for reference, but most of the time, I referred simply to diary notes. I found that was the quickest way to record impressions and to get the flavor of what I wanted to recall.”
Antreasian’s journey home, after the war in the Pacific ended, had a transformational impact on his future as an artist. The transport ship that brought him back to the U.S. often docked in big, metropolitan ports providing Antreasian with opportunities to visit world class art collections. He described the enthusiasm of the curators meeting him, still in uniform, and eager to look at art. “They didn’t know me from Adam, but their enthusiasm and love for prints just spilled over to anybody who would come and look, I became aware of other things taking place in printmaking, and, consequently when the war was over and I eventually returned to art school to complete my studies, my interest had elevated way past American Scene Painting, and I was much more interested in what we think of as the modern movements in art at that time.”
After the war, Antreasian earned his B.F.A. from the John Herron Art Institute where he would also teach briefly. In 1946, Antreasian was given a show at the Hoosier Salon’s Hoosier Art Gallery showcasing watercolors he made during his three-year stint as a combat artist. Later, he studied modern printmaking techniques in New York under Will Barnet at the Art Students League and Stanley William Hayter (also a camoufleur) at Atelier 17. Antreasian was the first technical director of the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles in the early 1960s. He is credited with the revival of lithography in the United States in the 20th century.
Harry Davis [American, 1914-2006]
Harry Davis was born in Hillsboro, Indiana. After enlisting in the Army in 1942, Davis’ camouflage unit, as part of the 84th Engineering Camouflage Battalion, shipped out to North Africa where they designed camouflage for the 12th Bomb Group in French Morocco. Creative deception of the landing strip and the painting of B-25 Mitchell Bombers in patches of flat desert colors were the unit’s primary concerns. When time permitted, Davis painted nose art at the request of the airmen, adorning their planes with pretty girls and cartoon characters. The unit went on to support the 82nd Airborne in Tunisia working on making their equipment and clothing less conspicuous as they prepared to jump into Sicily. From there, the camouflage unit created dummy ships and depots to throw off the enemy’s observation of supply lines. In December 1945 they were sent on a harrowing voyage to Italy to join the 5th Army, weathering a storm at sea ravaged the convoy their Liberty ship had joined. After 27 days, Davis and his unit arrived in Naples mostly unscathed. Camouflage and road repair between Naples and the front at Cassino occupied the unit where Davis was Company Draftsman. Davis was shaken by much that he observed in Italy where he had spent a couple of happy years studying art and exploring Europe in the 1930s. As his unit approached Rome, shortly after its liberation, Davis dreaded what he would find, but happily learned his old friends, and even his old studio had survived. He was surprised to learn that an Academy classmate, Chester Starr, was now a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel and the Commanding Officer of the Fifth Army Historical Unit. The unit’s mission was to document the work of the 5th Army and its warfighters. Starr’s influence placed Davis among the handful of artists serving under him, and Davis was able to remain in Italy in his new role. Davis was assigned to embed with the 85th Infantry Division, essentially serving as a foxhole artist making quick sketches recording the lives of the soldiers in all the elements of life at the front. Davis was with the 85th at the Gothic Line as they pushed through terrible battle at the foot of the Apennine mountains. He was able to take his sketches to Florence where the 5th Army Headquarters had been established in late 1944. Here he completed paintings from the sketches, returning periodically to embed with the 85th documenting its advances through Italy. In the spring of 1945, Davis sketched the liberation of Bologna, later completing an oil painting of the celebration. In May, the artist recorded captured German soldiers and their abandoned gear. Soon after, his unit was declared unessential, their work was shipped to Washington where it became the property of the War Department. Some of the unit’s works are in the collection of the U.S. Army Center of Military History at Fort Belvoir, Virginia.
Following the war, Davis’ career was prolific and included both an education at the John Herron Art Institute and nearly four decades as an educator, also at Herron. His body of work consists of hundreds of paintings portraying his rural Indiana roots and careful renderings of Indianapolis architecture slated for demolition — invaluable references for architects, historians and preservationists.
Click here to see an interview describing the Ghost Army exhibit while it was on display at FWMoA! To see works from our permanent collection in person, plan your next visit!
References
Behrens, Roy R.; C A M O U P E D I A: A blog for clarifying and continuing the findings that were published in Camoupedia: A Compendium of Research on Art, Architecture and Camouflage, by Roy R. Behrens (Bobolink Books, 2009). https://camoupedia.blogspot.com/search/label/American%20Camouflage%20Corps
Embury II, Aymar; Reminiscences of a Camouflage Officer, The Military Engineer, Vol. 19, No. 105 (MAY-JUNE, 1927). https://www.jstor.org/stable/44691344
Davis Jr., Harry A.; Experiences of a Soldier Artist: a narrative of events of the three years that I spent overseas, January 22, 1946. https://exhibits.library.indianapolis.iu.edu/sc001/items/show/18.
Indiana University Purdue University Indianapolis Library, Special Collections at University Library;Top of FormBottom of Form The Artist in Peace and War: Harry Davis in Italy 1938-1945. https://exhibits.library.indianapolis.iu.edu/sc001/exhibits/show/harrydavis
National Park Service, Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park; The War of Deception: Artists and Camouflage in World War I. https://www.nps.gov/articles/the-war-of-deception.htm
Parkinson, E. Malcolm; Prologue Magazine, Spring 2012, Vol. 44, No. 1, The Artist at War, Painters, Muralists, Sculptors, Architects Worked to Provide Camouflage for Troops in World War I. https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2012/spring/camouflage.html
Smithsonian Archives of American Art; Oral history interview with Garo Zareh Antreasian, 1974 March 29. https://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/interviews/oral-history-interview-garo-zareh-antreasian-12785.
U.S. Army Center of Military History; History of the U.S. Army Combat Artist Program. https://history.army.mil/Army-Museum-Enterprise/US-Army-Combat-Artist-Program/
Wikipedia; List of camoufleurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_camoufleurs